‘I leave a page half-writ’

Abstract

According to Foucault, the twentieth century has continued unabated the nineteenth’s obsession with constructing the truth of sex. For us, as for the Victorians, sex must yield stable, basic truths about ourselves, our identities. We, too, turn practices into narratives, transitory acts into whole truths. Foucault’s oft-discussed example, the creation of the homosexual as an essential, defined, limited — and, in a homophobic society, limiting — identity, has its parallel today in the continuing struggle to define or normalize — by which we control the meaning of — lesbian or gay experience.¹ This intervention to free forms of sexuality made invisible by the heterosexual, married norm has, however, a price: in the name of escaping their repression and gaining our freedom, it oversimplifies the rhetorical strategies of those nineteenth-century women and men who simultaneously participated in and resisted the dominant cultural discourses and practices. This essay explores some of these complex strategies for narrating desire by reading the tactical deployment of sexuality in the texts and experience (constructed for us through texts) of ‘Michael Field’, the pseudonym of two late Victorian women who loved each other and collaborated on poetry and drama. In their 1893 book of verse, Underneath the Bough, the two poets have anticipated the desire of both Victorian and modern critics to put their poetry into narratives of sexuality, the compulsion to turn sex into discourse (to use Foucault’s phrase), on the one hand, and have both participated in and resisted that play, on the other. Their evasive strategy depends upon their awareness of what we would now call ‘reader-response’ — the reader’s desire to turn parts into wholes, a sequence of lyrics into narrative, to ‘fill in’ an ‘incomplete’ text with interpretation.